The Information School at the University of Sheffield - the UK's 1st iSchool

Wednesday, 29 August 2007

Spatial Information Literacy Development

There is the first Centre for Information Literacy Research research seminar on 4th September at 13.00. Maryam Nazari talks about A Case study in spatial information literacy development. It takes place in Regent Court Room 204 (2nd Floor). "In this presentation I will share my learning of the process of formation of, and some findings from, an inductive case study. My research aims at exploring concepts of geospatial information, Geographic Information Science/systems(GIS), and competencies GIS learners need to be able to find, evaluate, and use geospatial information and solve problems with GIS. The ability to understand a problem / task and to find, evaluate, and use information is a vital provision for problem solving. Information literacy has been proposed as enabler of this ability. However to enable people in different disciplines to solve problems requires understanding of that discipline, and of the nature and characteristics of information used in the discipline. Although there are numerous studies on developing information literacy models for different disciplines, there is a lack of knowledge in the area of Geographic Information Science/ systems. An embedded single case study will investigate the concepts and phenomena, using different qualitative methods including in-depth interviews, document study data, questionnaires, and learners’ reflection on their learning. The case is a GIS partnership program developed and delivered by three universities across the UK and US in an online distance learning environment. This case was selected based on the theoretical sampling method. Qualitative data analysis methods are used to analyse the data."